prairiemule:

I want to talk about Arthur’s art! I don’t think I’ve really seen a post about it before, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I’ve seen his art described frequently as beautifully rendered and detailed, but if you really take a good look at it, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. And that’s not a bad thing, his technique is very quick, he gets in the details he can, but he doesn’t focus a lot on that.

They are excellent sketches, but none are truly refined. Other than his points of interest drawings and legendary animals, most of his stuff is done with fast, confident strokes. He seems to focus more on the forms of things than anything else.

From what I can tell, this man never erases anything. And based on how he crosses out words when writing, he probably doesn’t even have an eraser. Or if he does, it’s buried away somewhere. Back then, a pencil with an eraser on the end was a rarer thing, so chances are he didn’t have one like that. And if I remember right, when we do actually see Arthur using a pencil in a few cut scenes, it doesn’t have an eraser on it.

Something my friend Hyde (@my-funky-little-cowboy​) said, was that he has both good and bad drawings, he has ‘failures’ amongst his art. And I think that’s very human and realistic. He’s not perfect. And he also doesn’t scribble these drawings out, he accepts them, and as Hyde said, he learns from them.

There’s probably what I would say are 3 tiers to his art. 

The first would be things he didn’t get quite right, or stopped part way through. Or just very simple, small things that he could complete in not that many strokes.

The second would be pieces that are more detailed and probably took more time, and are complete in his eyes. But they’re usually not very large pieces.

The third are his detailed two page spreads, or sometimes just a single page. These are things such as the points of interest, strangers, or legendary animals. He must have spent the evening before he went to sleep, or some down time during the day and focused on making the sketch as good as he could get it. They are the best examples of highly detailed and well rendered pieces. 

The top examples of what I’ve shown here are probably Shady Belle and the legendary bison (there is no ‘best’ drawing from Arthur here, these are all just recent things he’d drawn in the save I loaded)

He is a very talented artist, there is no denying that. But his technique is all about speed and committing to the pencil strokes. His art might be the only place he’s truly carefree. Because he knows he’s never going to show it to anybody, so he doesn’t need to worry about it and what people will think, cause it’s all for him.